Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

Kepler/Copernicus

The transformation of the geocentrical to the heliocentrical cosmology evolved during a long period of time. In the first period in early medieval times, Latin authors like Martianus Capella and Pliny, who allowed no quantitative description of the stellar movements, were adopted. It was only during the twelfth century that the manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Almagest reached Europe. However, the complex theory of stellar movements described in the Almagest could only be mathematically recalculated and empirically improved in the fourteenth century.

By combining two earlier traditions, Copernicus formulated a heliocentrical variant of Arabic predecessor models –a variant that resulted in the rapid development of exact astronomy after its publication in Copernicus’s ground-breaking work “De revolutionibus.” Finally, it was Kepler who completed the classical epicyclical conception of planetary models and created the ground for a new celestial mechanics based on physical principles. The historic adequacy of different concepts of theoretical change in astronomy is investigated in a research program covering a wide range of periods.

Graßhoff, Gerd (2008c). “Natural Law and Celestial Regularities from Copernicus to Kepler.” In Natural Law and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Europe: Jurisprudence, Theology, Moral, and Natural Philosophy, edited by Lorraine Daston and Michael Stolleis. Ashgate: Surrey, pp. 143–161.